ASTON MARTIN DRIVES INTO THE NEXT CENTURY WITH MICROSOFT 365

After 104 years of making beautiful cars, Aston Martin Lagonda is looking forward to another century with an exceptional, expanded model lineup. The company aims to produce more cars for a wider audience at a faster pace, while keeping intact its heritage of bespoke quality. Aston Martin is firmly on track to accelerate production by using Microsoft 365 digital tools to energize employee creativity, data insights, and teamwork, pushing the boundaries of performance and style for the ultimate driving experience.

Beautiful. Bespoke. British. Preferred ride of 007. One of the world’s most iconic brands, Aston Martin needs no introduction. Its heritage—104 years of visionary design and personal attention to detail—defines the allure of every Aston Martin car.

“Driving an Aston Martin is about the experience. It comes from the heart and it’s personal,” says Andrew Palmer, Chief Executive Officer at Aston Martin Lagonda. “Each car we produce is a unique reflection of its owner’s dreams and desires translated by our engineers and artisans into a unique form of beautiful. That’s what makes the Aston Martin brand come alive, one customer at a time.”

It all happens at a state-of-the-art facility in the British countryside. “People come to Gaydon to do the best work of their careers,” says Palmer. “There are only 2,000 of us. For Aston Martin, small equates to powerful and agile.”

“However, it takes more than the talent of our employees to bring a beautiful car to market,” adds Simon Sproule, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Aston Martin Lagonda. “Creating an automobile of our caliber involves one of the most complex manufacturing processes in any industry. We need the best systems, technology, and collaboration tools we can find. To help deliver every car on time and on budget, Aston Martin runs its business on Office 365.”

One thousand components of beautiful

There are approximately 1,000 components in the latest Aston Martin sports car, the DB11. Behind every component is an employee who takes pride in personally attesting to its quality. It’s a shared commitment that shines through the entire manufacturing process, from a designer’s initial drawing of the car’s silhouette to Palmer personally inspecting the first 1,000 DB11s that rolled off the line.

“What’s unique about working at Aston Martin is that everything that each person does can be traced back to something that happens in a car,” says Sally Leathers, Chief Engineer for Electrical & Electronics at Aston Martin Lagonda. “It was fantastic for me to be able to look under the bonnet of the DB11 and say, ‘That’s my engine, I made that.’ I know that the rest of the management team feels the same way. Innovation and creativity thrive when we can share our best practices and our enthusiasm. We’re like a big family, where everyone is excited about the same thing.”

Those 1,000 components come together to make a beautiful whole, thanks to collaborative processes that can take between 200 and 2,000 hours, and involve hundreds of people for each car. “The cars we create mirror our organization,” says Sproule. “Collaboration is our culture. So, the more we share ideas, the more we drive innovation and creativity. The more we share data and work in teams, the more efficient our production. That’s why we use Office 365.”

The second century

As Aston Martin revs up production under a bold new plan for the next 100 years, sharing data and ideas within teams and across departments is even more important. In the company’s Second Century Plan, Andrew Palmer challenged the business to deliver seven new car models, at 7,000 units per year, in a seven-year cycle. It began with the DB11. In 2017, there will be a new Vantage, and in 2018 a new Vanquish. In 2019, Aston Martin will introduce the DBX, its first SUV, giving the brand an entry into a new market. Along the way, it will relaunch the Lagonda and begin development of the connected car, expanding the company’s portfolio and engaging a whole new generation of customers.

“Our challenge is to empower people to achieve a product launch pace unprecedented in 104 years,” says Sproule. “At the same time, how do we maintain that personal connection to the cars and our famous artisanal quality? We see the collaboration tools in Microsoft 365 as essential for our business transformation.”

Improved collaboration

Overseeing an expanded portfolio of projects under the Second Century Plan is complicated by the fact that Aston Martin is a multi-site company, thanks to a new vehicle development base at the MIRA Technology Park in Warwickshire and a new manufacturing facility in South Wales. Testing sites and suppliers are located around the world, but along with Microsoft Exchange Online cloud-based email, Mark Stringer, Director of Program Management at Aston Martin Lagonda, uses Skype for Business Online to erase the distances with real-time video calls that keep the momentum high.

“Whether we’re communicating a timing plan to a supplier or discussing a test run in southern Italy, Microsoft collaboration tools are invaluable,” says Stringer. “I remember one morning on the test track with the DB11, we were collecting performance updates to present to the board of directors that afternoon. It was getting late and as I drove back to Gaydon, my colleague in the back seat worked on a laptop using his mobile phone as a hotspot to add the final stats to our Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and upload it to OneDrive. Back at Gaydon, we walked directly into the meeting, our presentation finalized and ready to go.”

Enhanced business insight

Now that Aston Martin is accelerating production, the value of its data becomes even more important. “Data is one of the vital assets of any car company. We probably create more data now in a year than the company generated in the previous 103 years,” says Palmer. “And to enhance agility, you need the tools and the processes to make good decisions using that data.”

Aston Martin uses Microsoft Power BI dashboards to get a handle on its data. “With Power BI, we’re turning information into insight,” says Neil Jarvis, Director of Information Technology and Information Security at Aston Martin Lagonda. “The simplicity of the dashboards and the richness of the data is generating interest across the company.”

The goal is always to deliver a car on budget and on time. But when issues arise, employees use Power BI dashboards to zero in on a troublesome metric and solve the problem. “We find Power BI hugely useful for combining information from a multitude of sources so we can immediately see a red flag in a metric or project status,” says Stringer. “The sooner we see the problem, the faster we can solve the issue so we stay on track with the schedule.”

Energized creativity

Designing an exquisite car starts with a single idea, but it requires a team to make it real. Four years before Stringer and his colleague presented the DB11 performance stats to the Aston Martin board, the car model existed in a designer’s mind only. It took the collaborative efforts of concept engineering, manufacturing, product marketing, and finance teams to drive that vision to the end of the production line. “If we communicate perfectly with other departments, then we achieve a holistic view and everyone is aligned,” says Marek Reichman, Chief Creative Officer at Aston Martin Lagonda. “Otherwise, we get a beautiful sculpture that doesn’t go anywhere.”

According to Reichman, the ability to access and share information energizes the creative process and drives teamwork at Aston Martin. “To achieve our goals for the next century, our designers can’t wait around for information. Twenty-four hours makes a difference in the design studio,” he says. “We use Microsoft cloud productivity tools every day to make sure the teams have the right information, exactly when they need it. That maximizes their creative energy, which translates into the visual excitement you see in the car’s design—and that’s what our customers respond to.”

New platform strategy

From her perspective as chief engineer, Leathers describes electronics as the lifeblood of the car, touching every single component in the vehicle and defining the human-machine interface. Similarly, electrical engineers have to coordinate with people in every area of product development, including body, powertrain, chassis, and interior trim. This is especially important given the new production quotas expected of her department.

“To deliver the cars on time, we’re designing one type of underbody and set of electrical components that we can reuse for different vehicle platforms,” says Leathers. “That means we need to communicate in different ways, with more interaction between platform engineers and the vehicle program application engineers who modify the platform to create different cars. Before, teams worked in silos on each different model, so there was less requirement for collaboration.”

To facilitate this teamwork, Leathers and her colleagues use Microsoft SharePoint Online team sites to store all the information generated during the development of a car from prototype to the final model. “Whether it’s project timelines, budgets, CAD designs, or presentations for the board, it’s easy to search and find what you need on SharePoint,” Leathers says. “I also have self-service access to data in the Power BI dashboards built by the project management team, so I can manage my resources easily.”

Building each component in a car requires careful planning, from design schedules to supply lead times to build lead times to iterative improvements to final production. Leathers and her teammates use Project Online to “glue it all together.”

“Managing timing is crucial,” says Leathers. “We use task dependences in Project Online to ensure that everything stays on track, even if a supplier suddenly can’t make a delivery date. That way we know that our critical compatibility points among different design elements are always aligned, which means we get a more cohesive product and a higher quality car earlier in the development phase. Ultimately, this means a better car for the customer.”

Better resource management

Stringer and his program management team also use Microsoft Project Online to rationalize the new pace of production. He manages a portfolio of new vehicle programs, from concept to production, liaising with designers, engineers, manufacturers, and marketers across the company. Instead of working on one program at a time, Stringer now oversees up to 10 programs concurrently.

“To manage this level of activity, we had to change the way we work to be even more collaborative and efficient with our time and resources,” says Stringer. “We consider Project Online absolutely critical to the new way we do business. Within our 10 programs, internal resources—between 20 and 30 percent of total costs—ebb and flow over time. As we look at the whole portfolio, we can tweak resource allocation and timelines across programs. We use the same number of people but more intelligently, so we are more efficient and deliver more revenue.”

Secure by design

Closer collaboration requires mobile, reliable access to information so team members never have to wait to get an answer or move to the next stage in development. But the value of the company’s intellectual property means that for Aston Martin, mobility must never come at the expense of security. As the company moves forward with its Second Century Plan, Jarvis is looking to Microsoft cloud technologies, such as Microsoft 365 Enterprise to help. This solution combines Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security.

“Everything we use needs to be secure by design, so by adopting Office 365, we could move our data off employee devices to OneDrive, where it’s safeguarded in the Microsoft cloud environment,” Jarvis says. “Employees depend less on a given device, they can work from anywhere, and we have the degree of security that we require for our intellectual property. And with the Digital Rights Management capabilities within Office 365, we gain a further element of control, specifying who can access documents that we share internally and externally. Microsoft 365 takes us one step further with the integrated simplicity of cloud-based management and evergreen services, while delivering additional intelligent security solutions to help us avoid advanced threats before they hit our network.”

Increased reliability for public site

Aston Martin takes advantage of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform to host its public-facing website. The website is home to a popular tool for customers to build their dream Aston Martin car. Called the Car Configurator, it is a key marketing device that reinforces the personal, interactive approach to customer relationships and it’s important that the site performs as well as any Aston Martin car.

“Pushing our customer-facing systems into the Microsoft cloud platform makes sense from both an availability and a security perspective” say Jarvis. “The infrastructure that Microsoft has deployed in building the Azure cloud is impressive. Add to that, the Microsoft diligence in maintaining the environment, means that we don’t worry about the integrity of our data and we achieve far better availability figures at much lower cost.”

Jarvis is adamant that everything his IT team does aligns with the goals of the Second Century Plan. “IT is a cornerstone of our strategy for the future,” he concludes. “The IT tools we choose for employees have to deliver a sustainable return on investment. At Aston Martin, we’re using Microsoft cloud technologies, including Office 365, to help navigate the road ahead.”